"Shapes of the New Sculpture" lecture, Richard Lippold, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1964.

"Shapes of the New Sculpture" lecture, Richard Lippold, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1964.

Creator

Baltimore Museum of Art;

Subject

Baltimore Museum of Art; Lippold, Richard, 1915-; Sculpture, Modern;

Description

On February 4, 1964, Richard Lippold, American constructivist sculptor gave a lecture at the Baltimore Museum of Art entitled "Shapes of the New Sculpture". Richard Lippold's sculptures reveal a concern for the space that they occupy, and for movement, real and apparent. They are often made of fragmented metal, wire or rods, sometimes giving an impression of weightlessness. The original title for his lecture was to be "Where Is Sculpture?" Lippold talked about the changing nature of sculpture at the time, and how objects never thought of as sculpture were considered so.

Transcript

-- in theory it's been a feature however if you may not know as well, University of Michigan, Gordon College, and Purdue College. This masterpiece which most of you have seen, this many considered as masterpiece is that lyrical, astronomical, and then your music known as variation seven to the full moon and the Museum of Modern Art in New York which makes some of the early constructivist appear as Andrew Ritchie said if you are ready by comparison and in which space has been captured as (inaudible 00.43). I think Ritchie's response typifies all of us although his response was made something like 10 years ago, it's still full of joy. Mr. Lippold himself has habit a number of things to say about sculpture and various articles and quotations and has said that once the fear for example of dealing with the delicate tensions in this work has been overcome. One is free again for the elements of life to function. And it's interesting to note at this juncture that he also commented on the relevancy of this. He said we must remember that a snip of paper in the wrong place someone's desk or a portfolio can now destroy mankind and it's not the main intentions we must fear. It is the little delicate relationships we must fear. Well, unlike the constructivist who does not struggle from what is called irrationalism which is successive edifice complex.
(Informal Talk)
Being an individual, he does not support ever in the garden of (inaudible 2.16) as it call.
That he got (inaudible 2.24) paradise. Norah like the pop artist is another guitarian believing that necessarily what is new is better. So it's a great pleasure to introduce Mr. Lippold speaking on the Shapes of New Sculpture, Mr. Lippold.
Applause
Thank you Dr. Floyd.
Applause
I just pulled out of my pocket the check for this lecture I would be happy to read you but let's do it afterwards. People are very fond of coming up to me these days and saying how nice to meet you in the prime of your life, at the peak of your career, at the top of your forum, at the height of your power, but they aren't kidding anybody because especially not me because I know all they mean is you are getting middle age. This has its rewards however, Pepsi may be for those you think young but middle age like Coke is truly the pause that refreshes.
(Informal Talk)
So I am looked upon by those who are young as a classical old fogie and by those who are my elder peers as a young up and growing up star. It's very nice to be envied from both ends of the human spectrum. Because of this unique situation, I would like to offer two apologies for anyone I say this afternoon and they are only two that I shall offer. I would like to apologize first of those who are younger than I am for being so old and to those who are older than I am for being so young, please remember that. The original title for this talk which I sent to this museum was "Where is Sculpture?" I know that this has been translated in the program which I have received into Beglar Merlich as Shapes of the New Sculpture.
(Informal Talk)
I do not intend to talk about the Shapes of the New Sculpture because you need to walk only a few steps from here to get some idea of what they are or if you want to see everything on the general menu of three dimensional forum today, you need to travel only about 200 miles to north to see the largest concentration of the world of everything from soup to nuts. I am not sure that I can even stick altogether to my original topic of "Where is Sculpture" because I don't think I know anymore exactly where it is largely because of there are extraordinary and astonishing things have been happening in the art world in the last few years. It is to be that when little Johnny or Bobby or Andy came in from outdoors with treasures gathered from the streets, empty lots, gutters and garbage cans, bottle tops, old calendars, buttons, hubcaps. Mummy or daddy used to say one of two things depending on whether they were fundamentalists or followers of Giselle and Spark. Either they yell, get that junk out of this house or they encourage their offspring's curiosity with such forced sympathies as why what beautiful things you found. This has all changed.
Now Bobby and Johnny and Georgie and Andy and Roy stamped into the white walled living room and dump their bottles, soup cans, old comic books, neon tubes all over the sleek German or Italian literatures. And mom and pop may be that's why it's called Pop-art, explain with one voice, you are darling, what beautiful things you have made.
Probably they are rushed off to the farther church on 53rd Street where they are baptized officially. Their allowance increased from 25 cents a week to $2,500 a week and the way it sent forth that we must rejoice that we have been enlightened. We have been shown things that we never noticed in the world before, in our stupid zeal to discover the whole dealt man, his senses, his feelings, his thoughts and the nature of his spirit. We have nearly been chasing delusions and missing the only true reality in the world excrement. Now the thought that I have been such an old fashion fool depresses me. If anyone here in Baltimore this weekend had said defarm your meal composed of garbage and whatever state of decomposition or the livings even from the oat cuisine of the Pavillion or the Four Seasons or the two (inaudible 7.58) peruse, pooled I would have been disgusted and insulted. If my dentist had chosen to fill a gap in my lower left jaw, left by the loss of three mollers with the worn out pitted remains of someone else's extractions or perhaps even dog's teeth or the raiment of an old wood saw, (inaudible 8.21) complained to the ADA.
Strangely not even my young clinical friend served me very good fresh food and complained over poor dental ware. We might even agree that if a geophysicist rushed into an international conference shouting hey look fellows, you are way off the track with you are mooning on router space and into atomic structures I have got great news for you, I know the crust of the earth is made of dirt. If this happened you would be laughed off the platform. And this is a little bit like a look of the gallery and bookshop scene recently. Little Johnny and I opened his fly or even takes off his pants altogether in the white washed church and confident with the assurances of his maturity says gee, look pop, I am man too, I will bet mine is bigger than yours. He is not yanked off to jail or a state farm, he is not even left out of church, he is not even sympathetically helped by ceremonies of manhood such as even the most primitive societies require after proof of competence. There is no confirmation that church not even a bar (inaudible 09:29) instead he is enshrined on the altar or given the sixth printing.
It seems to me that it should be known in our sophisticated culture that it is a fundamental requirement of every artist to glory and what his eyes discovered in the world without passing judgment on its moral or aesthetic value and to glory in sex as well as other sensuousness. This is no special gift it seems to me it's a prerequisite. I personally have not filled I was old fashioned in my desire to utilize all of the equipment that I possess. I have always felt quite naturally that I was merely eternally fashioned in the matter of all men and yet recently I was told by the most Avant-Garde an influential artist of our time and a dear old friend Richard, you have a marvelous mind. It's time you stop using it. He happens to be a composer, I will give you one guess with the most sensitive ear in the world today for all sounds both natural and artificial organized and unorganized and it would have been very easy to reply Johnny you have marvelous ears for sound, it's time you stop them up, but I happen to love him. However we are told these days that's wrong too we should cut out our hearts as well as our minds. Apparently, all that a human being really is according to the Kinder Barton said there is a two-eyed, two-eared, muscle bam fellows, wrapping in the day where you left over by more complicated diluted creatures were foolish enough to try to create new farms with love and thought from new materials in society with different concerns from any whichever existed before.
Because I look at my being from head to toe outside and inside I am distressed I suppose that I discover that I am much more than senses and fellows. What am I going to do with all of these useless cards, the iteration and authoritative places of the groupings have been experienced even of incompetence leaves me in considerable doubt of my values and those of my peers in our art. Thank God that your responsibility is not as rampant and science medicines are the culinary arts it would all be dead physically as well as spiritually. I don't know whether you are lucky or unlucky this afternoon, we will both know may be when I finished because I may present you with a double head in the form of two lectures this is only the introduction.
(Informal Talk)
The first dating about five BP, before pop, and filled with the aesthetic flowering of confidence of self-position. The second of there is time written last year questioning the nature of my previous illusions. So you see this is not exactly a lecture about sculpture but rather a public examination of both private and public values. So bear with me while I take you on the journey through a land no longer considered very real where senses are senses, mind is mind, heart is heart and art is art. I warn you however this avenue is not paved entirely about paradoxes. Now very marvelous thing has happened. Last evening at dinner Mrs. Rosen with whom I had a great deal of correspondence or I should say all the correspondence relating to this lecture told me at dinner that she had just read an article which I had written five years ago and to know me a little bit better, by the time I got here and I asked what the article was and it was one of those which I can tend to refill this afternoon and this upset me enormously because I have been telling you in this introduction about the use of new materials and stuff and not being concerned with debris, and here I was about to offer you some of my own debris five years even though I have already justified it for you.
So it's been the first time of the night worrying about what I should do with this finally felt asleep after half a dozen aspirins and when I woke up this morning rest of my suitcase to see again what I had written and discovered with a delighted heart that I have left both the articles in New York. And of course I could have called, Mrs. Rosen said rush over the article but I felt this was cheating since they have been so kind I intended any further. So I am going to talk to you extemporaneously, jot down a few notes and kind of summation of the ideas that I had five years ago and also how these ideas have faired since. This shift in my concern for what I have always felt naturally my function as an artist was and then I will question you this in the last year or so when I involved a very low period of self analysis I suppose has been clarified so much but I am reading recently two amazing documents at least they seem so to me. The first is a book by Dr. Simeons, whom some of you may know of called "Man's Presumptuous Brain". This is a book which deals with psychosomatic illness. I have had in my career of course as an artist and as a student of art certain elementary and fundamental courses in anatomy. And I always knew something about the layout of the muscles and where my heart is and my ** seems to be right there. What am I talking about, my lungs and my liver and all it is, and I always knew little bit about how they function but this book suddenly made me aware of the way in which they cannot by any kind of conception get along without each other.
Every muscle fiber and every nerve bending and every soaked and every feeling seems totally interdependent upon every other one. And I was struck for the first time in my life and made aware in my physical presence as well as my psychic presence of the complete and total structure of this thing that I called myself just on those levels that everyone calls themselves. Particularly as I say in relation to the inter-relation of every little detail for every other little detail, physical, psychic and emotional.
And I began to think about these different things that not only is it physical relationship but also the psychic and the emotional one and in remembering my children I now have a small child again and watching it perform, it struck me that this combination of physical, psychic and emotional, I should say physical psychic and intellectual departments seem to develop as we move through life, certainly in childhood one is not exclusively physical but this is a time for certainly for physical investigation in youth emotional development plays an enormous role. I remember that peculiar and aesthetic state of confusion which we loved to call youth in which I on the one hand was all sex and on the other hand all intellect ranting and raving over marvelous ideals on the one hand and half the day and the other half day concerning myself with my basic needs.
And now that I have reached this state that I described for you euphemistically in the beginning I find these things to sort of come together and I find that I enjoy employing all of these aspects of myself as I already said. And it strikes me that as in a human being, in the single organism of a human being there is this interrelationship of these parts, so as we grow as that interrelationship with other people and with values - I don't know what other word to use - concerns outside ourselves and involved in the social structure.
(Informal Talk)
I also feel that I love all these things that have happened to me and I love them in other people too, if I have been hard on top artist I think I am hard on them only because I have the uneasy feeling that at this particular moment I don't know whether I am right or wrong but I have the feeling that at this particular moment there is some confusion as to what the values in the art world are. If as I have parity them the out-values, the top art are those values which are delightful in children or in the very young, this is fine, but whether this should be recognized falsely to my perception as new contributions to the total function of art then I think we should raise questions about them. This is particularly true because I think artists have just begun to find themselves at this point and our century involved with things that are outside themselves, this is not only social concern but it also has to do with a rapport with people in other professional areas, such as scientists, architects and so on.
People whose concerns for the problems of art time, the conditions of art time, understanding conditions of art time are parallel, one of the most marvelous people of this sort that I know of is the man who I met at Aspen Colorado couple of years ago where we are both on a platform together. Man by the name of Heinzman Foster and who some of you may know people keep asking you who he is or what he does and I am not sure that I understand all together. He seems to do with electronics, with biology, with IBM machines computers and such and he has one splendid sense of humor any person I ever met much greater than any artist that I haven't know of, possible exception of John Cage and myself.
And his probing into every aspect of human condition through the latest scientific means with great curiosity and glee is a joy to be home, he delivered a lecture which he sent me a copy of not the one that I heard at Aspen but a different one, in which he describes, he has incidentally for instance used electronic computers to determine the exact moment in the future, when the last human being will be born to suffocate all of humanity due to the population explosion. He has his pin pointed us to time and place. I think this is the sense of humor. But in this particular article he describes, using what I called microprobes and I apologize in City of Baltimore, well I wasn't going to apologize again, well you can include it in previous one.
At least in the city which harbors Johns Hopkins University as when I talk about these things, since I don't know a lot about them but I am intrigued by the fact that Dr. (inaudible 21.53) describes the use of microprobes which are tiny, tiny little tungsten filaments which can be attached to a single human cell not a whole organ or part of an organ but to one cell and it's behavior electronically I suppose energy wise can be seen and evaluated. So you could take any one of these things that I read about in the other book, Dr. Simeons who describes the interaction of all these things to sort of total picture you can take any one of these little details and describe exactly what happens in the physical process but he is interested in much more than that. He describes what is in his book attaching a microprobe to a cell in the retina of the eye.
And following the impulse to the brain and by various kinds of stimulation he becomes involved with the total aspect of how we see not only physically but how we see emotionally and how we evaluate new experiences and old ones. You know it's a great deal to say about what is Alucobond Art and what is not Alucobond Art in terms of how familiar we are with things. So he is very simulating person in his broad understanding of human condition it is great joy in probing further into an understanding of men.
Now before the pop in this article I have written five years ago, I was at that time as I revealed in the article front and I may do it for you now, reviewing what it seems to me man's nature is. And I like to feel that as I think I have already said we are not only senses, we are not only feelings, we are not even only thoughts, or any one of these things as well just have been, this hasn't changed that I can see in history of men.
But if we get all of this going at the same time in some way if there are senses that we feel and through our feelings we think and send messages back and forth between all of these in this total entity that human being can be, it's possible that we can combine all these to reveal to us something that's very slippery and it can only be described by a word that hesitate to use because it has such unpopular connotations right now and that is the spirit. I don't think an artist can describe spirit or set out to deal with it. It becomes a quality in his work that transcends any of the individual things or sensory feelings, the emotional content or the intellectual structure and is responsible for the presence that work of art as soon as before us as we see it. I don't believe and I am absolutely certain to this from my experience as an artist from having lived through many of the stages that art is constantly going through.
I am convinced that only when a work is seductive, sensuously and emotionally revealing and intellectually stimulating can it assume a structure with its own and presence of its own which we might say is inbuilt with a certain spirit. I think that this is the total responsibility of artist if you want to say he has a responsibility, at least it's putting a responsibility where it should be which is in the work and in the artist functioning in art, not revealing to the late public what goes into the working of art, how well the artist can see, how well he can feel, how well he can think, how big he is and in any particular dimension, these things I think are really entire aside from the point. But these are all old things and if this were the end of the artist's responsibility I suppose all works of art will look pretty much the same give or take a little bit of difference in the artist particular structure if he is more emotional or more intellectual or something else.
So I think that there is one enormous distinction between the art of peoples, not people but peoples. I have been talking pretty much about what I would like to call genes, the thing that makes the human being, the human being. But I think there is another extremely important and essential aspect of the artist concern or influence and that is his geography. And by geography I mean his total environment not just place where he was born, although it counts heavily, but the total landscape in which he lives. And this must be it would seem to me much more than a provincial landscape. I have been appalled as I have talked around the country to find myself in the middle of Rockies where some deserts are in place whether cultural or physical. And have people come up to me after a lecture with little clippings from ARTnews or some other cheap rag. And saying is it true that this week de kooning is painting with yellow on the left side or carders, things not move from top to bottom instead of bottom to top in this sort of business. And I stand in the midst of the Rocky Mountains I look all around or I stand in the midst of this desert. I came from such a desert myself a cultural one.
And I think why are they concerned with that little provincial corner of America called New York? The qualities of the so-called New York school are prudential that could only have happened in a certain area in New York which hardly is a mile square and which now are conceded to be the answer to all of the cultural problems of our time. I don't mean this kind of provincial geography I mean the total geography of our time the kinds of things that Mr. Finn Foster is doing and that are happening generally in our environment and have not to do with a particular area. Some years ago I sold a small piece of sculpture for $200 which was when I was on smaller loans. And I had fall in love about a year before over the watch that I saw on a pawnshop window on 57th Street it's the one I am wearing, it's very pretty watch. It's a Patek Philippe which is Rolls Royce of wrist watches.
And I had in my hand this for a long time because it's very old and not new, it wasn't new when I bought it. But it happened to cost $200 even very old so as soon as I saw this sculpture I rushed to the pawnshop and bought this watch and I have been very, very fond that it keeps beautiful time it's a joy to look at I know I have a watch on my wrist and not a $0.25 piece or it's like a clock. And I was very faithful to this watch until a few years ago I made an investment in new Patek Philippe. And this new Patek Philippe selling for $1,500 has two little buttons on it. If you push one hands advance one hour without losing a second. If you push the other button the hands turn backward for one hour without losing a second. The idea is if you fly across the country or the ocean and something keeps pushing these buttons and you keep up perfect time. Well I was very tempted to invest $1,500 which by that time I could afford and get this new Patek Philippe with these lovely buttons.
And then I read in the newspaper that the new plains have been developed which are going to fly from New York to Los Angeles in 2 and a quarter hours and something like that and I began to figure out how many times I have to push the button? And it turned out that I decided to wait for a new model Patek Philippe which would have no buttons on it which sell probably for $5,000 but with a very complicated mechanism that allowed the hand standstill.
I suppose you get my point this is something to do with international geography meaning that I could have breakfast in New York or a lunch in New York, breakfast in San Francisco. Am I making this noise, I guess not? And it's not my heart this time, getting too excited.
(Informal Talk)
Like I said I could have lunch in New York and have breakfast in San Francisco then have dinner the night before in Honolulu. I have been told also by the New York Times which is a very dependable rag that some people in Washington which isn't a very far from here so you may get it first conducted some experiments in the movements of electronic particles I guess that's what they were. And they were able to somehow manipulating some gadgets to get these little particles to go backward. Now with the theory of relativity in mind it was known these particles moved in a certain direction in terms of the advancing of time. When they reversed the little particles they knew that somehow time had also been reversed. This relates also to what I guess we all know which is that as we approach the speed of light time standstill and it's known the only way we can ever get into very fine dotted space in the men's life time is to fly that speeds approaching that of light because then time slows down to such an extent that we can go to Uranus or some such attractive place and making a round trip in about two years and when we came back to earth we would find out that some 4,000 or 5,000 years would have passed here men hadn't been here anymore.
The New York Times which prints only the news that's fit to read didn't see fit to print for me what would happen if we flew faster than the speed of light and landed it may be on Mars as infants and waited around for our old age to catch up with us. These tend to be rather disturbing ideas particularly disturbing to our egos I think. I read most recently that one of the latest concepts of what matter really is and this is important to me as a sculpture because I consider matter all the time. That matter is substance less. It is only an illusion somehow or other in the great emptiness of everything little particles of space set up a kind of same vital stands for reasons not just known and began to turn around making little vertices like tiny little whirlwinds, maelstroms, infinitesimal. Their byproducts such as waves, electrical energy and so on which are substance less intangible we interpret through our senses as composing matter.
When I was in junior high school I believe it was my ego suffered its first grade I believe after the one time my father spanked me which was to learn that I was 90% water. I thought about that for many years until, not long ago I read in one of my daughter�s textbooks in high school that Gordon Theorab just described to you I am 100% pure space that at least my ego about one proton high and one electron wide. So who is calling whom diluted becomes a problem in art these days. Now I recognized that the things I am talking about are illusions too and one of the charming things to me about contemporary science is that scientist could recognize this. They say that they are more astonished, the more they learn about how little they learn, they know. And it sounds like old-hat to an artist to any creative person but the fact that scientist beginning to understand this and recognizing in itself I think is quite remarkable.
It also has an enormous bearing on the nature of the influence of the artist in this international geography that I am talking about not the original one because it raises very serious philosophical issues are far beyond the ego of the individual artist. And these issues Richard raises are the very issues on which we will survive and I mean survive in our total sense not just physically. Whether illusion or not they are the basis of what I can only call faith I don't know what other they were to use. In order to stay alive one has to believe in something. When I was quite young I had a friend who was a student at the University of Michigan where I was teaching at that time. We met over an interesting music and he was the most brilliant student in the University of Michigan as it turned out. He was a mathematics major. He was also interested in creative writing we talked quite a lot about problem of the artist. And he said he really wanted to write but he was so bright at mathematics that he thought he will be able to make a career of that and maybe he could write on the side, famous last words. But he got a Rhodes Scholarship after his graduation by which time we had moved to New York and I was waiting in the stock talk to visit us, me especially because he wanted to talk about his future.
And he turned to me at one point in the evening after not having said anything for long time he is pacing back and forth very disturbed, very beautiful Youngman very tall, very blonde, very American, very bright. And he said Richard do you think you really have to be neurotic to be an artist I thought that this was about funniest thing I ever heard because I was so happy and excited about what I was doing and in my own life and in my career that I had said something simple and quick like who isn't and laughed about it. Well in the last 15 or 20 years since I have seen him I have heard that he came back from England and first became a teacher of mathematics without doing any writing and then he went into industrial mathematics where it's surprising, I know he lost to me and the world of art and hadn't done any writing although I maybe fool, one day. I began to think maybe I should have paid more attention to that question of his maybe he wasn't really neurotic enough so I thought with a retroactive sense of guilt at which I am very adapt as you can see. I looked up neurotic in the dictionary it was a big dictionary I realized it was a shortcut but it was a big dictionary and they sent me to a neurosis and in neurosis I found definition something like, preoccupation with obsessions, fears, compulsions without any apparent structural damage, the whole thing resulting in only a partial displacement of the personality. I thought that sounds to me just like somebody in love. And I based the whole series of thoughts on the idea that everybody I have ever known has been in love with something or somebody either tiny little aspect of life or a great deal of life. So he must be neurotic in some sense because this is what compels him and obsesses him and on which his fears are based and I wrote an article when I was going to redo the second which contained this kind of statement I read this article first at a university at which three psychiatrists got up and walked out when I began to say that in neurosis we are just being in love. But I think there is something of this involved in the fears compulsions obsessions or whatever we have about life that contribute to our illusions about it. Now I think that Dr Finn Foster is neurotic in a sense. I know I am neurotic as hell I won't tell you in detail just why I think so but I know that I have fears and compulsions and obsessions and what not and I would feel I was dead if I didn't.
Any person I have ever known in the world who has done anything that interested me from the greatest profits and religious leaders to the greatest artist and scientists and philosophers have had these compulsions, fears and obsessions. And they have resulted thank God in us partial disorientation of their personalities. Even New York Times must be neurotic if it prints such stuff as what's going to happen will fly at the speed of light because that disorients my personality a little bit.
I try to give you an idea of what I think there is larger geography is to which we all contribute at the moment. My final point is that the illusion of our time is no better no worse than the illusion of any other time. You may think so or you may wish it otherwise and you may yearn for an old enemy instead of a new one you may wish to vanquish the devil instead of outer space. But that we fight that we have remains the same in nature even though the opponent maybe different and I think the thing we have to come to terms with is what its nature truly is and that's what I have been trying to describe sort of vaguely for you having displaced the articles I was going to bring you.
Now this all sort of revives my face despite the onslaughts of Pop Art and other influences in late 20th century art which have looked at one small aspect of man's concern it seems to me rather than the total picture of what art is or can be and perhaps it is known as the artistic fault but it's the whole of society not in the society in which he lives which is frightened and fearful this is brought to my attention some years ago very amusingly by one of my favorite characters I don't how you here in the Baltimore ever felt about Margaret Truman. I used to like Margaret Truman. I thought it was considering the equipment knowledge she had, she was very courageous person.
(Informal Talk)
As our late President said courage is all, so I was fairly interested in the time that she got married and reading about the interviews that she gave just before she departed on her honeymoon. She was asked what the true service is going to be like, she said somebody in Rome because she knew if that a possibility, he had design it, and I don't know, that's in America, isn't here, well if somebody in Rome at that time. And they were going to fly to Italy to pick up her dresses and whatever they call and then to France and to Italy and Netherlands and they are going to do a grand tour in about two weeks. Her husband didn't have anymore time than that he was so busy, cooking up truths for the New York Times to print. And then they run and come back to New York and settle in an apartment. So someone said and what's your apartment going to be like, Mrs. Truman? How will you decorate it? And she said, only American nothing modern. It was sort of silence, which killed me a bit. And I was waiting for someone to say and Mrs. Truman what sort of government do you prefer? In which I would have been delighted if she had said to go with her 18th century furniture in Monarchy, since her father was President, he was known to puncture people occasionally, he might have spanked her. Most people like this kind of courage, and I suppose you can't blame any of us, well we want what Sereal Conley has called a wound with the view. The problem is to find one.
And as I guess what I am trying to tell you, we have to do, with whatever we have got, whether we have a lot or we don't have a lot these days doesn't seem to matter very much. I am not going to say very much more now because these two articles I left behind are all sort of coming and going through my being which is 100% pure space you will remember, also they are peculiar to electronic things happening to me, due to this --. I think some television programs are going through me and disturb the stresses. Queen for day is probably passing through my heart at the one. So I am going to stop pretty soon, but I did want to finish by saying that I finally feel now that I should have told my friend, some years back that just to be a human being and be alive, you would have to be what's called neurotic, according to the definition that I found. And the only important thing was really to look at life in the face and get busy and do something with it.
To this end I would rather like prayer that sort of Jacob Astley muttered at the battle before the Battle of Newbury, I read somewhere that he muttered it, but it must have been very loud mutter because it's come all the way through posterity, but it's a gorgeous prayer and it is this "Lord, I shall be very busy this day, and may forget thee, but do not thou forget me". Thank you.
(Audience)
Thou shall not love thyself above all men. I have tried to talk to you but I love all men. So that's where then I came here where I had some slides to show and my answer to that question, I think mine answer here is also I don't wish to be snide. But I cannot describe to you my sculpture, this is impossible, I can't tell you so many inches by so many centimeters or stocks of materials and ways, so much and it's so high. And I can't tell you physically what it is. To tell you what I put into it, seems to me a private matter. I don't think one should have a portrait of the artist necessary, this is my feeling, the reason that I already found a great links to explain. It will be presumptuous for me to tell you what you ought to feel and looking at it, so I won't do that, what's left.
(Audience)
If you want to see, I can tell you where you can find it. And that I think is Margaret point, although, even though I am middle-aged my ego is still little offended, the fact that you don't know where it is. But I will be praying and I will tell you. And Metropolitan Museum of Art has a recommended the, Museum of Modern Art has already been mentioned as possessing a work of mine. Well there are a number of museums all over the place and nearest one probably is in Richmond, Virginia, I guess is that closer than, no, it's not closer than New York, is it from here. Anyhow they have a new one I just finished recently a small one. They have many private collections that I couldn't begin to list. And they are as the last few years in public places, I made a flicking reference to the possibility of the artist working these days with other people than himself, which I think is healthy sign in the arts. So I won't go into that any further right now. And some of the results of these embryonic collaborations that I have had with architects, with organized labor, disorganized management, can be seen at the New Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, at New Pan American Building in the heart of New York but question will go out of this, that what did you call it.
And that one isn't actually finished and it's liking is yet so it's unfair to judge it. The Four Seasons Restaurant which I get the plug for in my introduction has the work of mine. I don't know what else, I can't remember all of them. I did something which I consider quite interesting to me for a Benedictine Monastery Church in Portsmouth, Rhode Island which is not generally very well known because it's bit of the way but it's not very far from Newport, in case any of you belong to the carriages set. And I have two things left in my own position that I am not giving my telephone number, any other questions.
(Audience)
I am teaching right now at the Baltimore Museum of Art. And you guess, I am a Professor at Hunter College in the City of New York where I have been since 1952 before that I thought was great variety, various kinds of institutions from private art schools to public universities, private universities, both progressive and timid.
(Audience)
Thank you, I would have hoped so.
(Audience)
Not as old as you or as young as you look.
(Audience)
I don't know when I was 15 I use to think how and having the name that I will be at 18. When I was 18 I thought, by 21, I will show you ought to look different from what I do now since I didn't think I look very good at 18. At 21, I thought something terrible will happen at 30 and at 30 I was greedier than I was 20 so that hadn't been an improvement. At 40 when I expected this great event to take place, nothing happened. But about 45, I began to get mattered at younger people. That's been going on for 4 years so you can figure out how old I am.
(Applause)

Publisher (Electronic Version)

Archives and Manuscripts Collections, The Baltimore Museum of Art;

Holding Institution

Baltimore Museum of Art;

Date Original

1964-02-23

Date Digital

2011

Type

Sound;

Format

Digital reproduction of one sound tape reel, 50 minutes, 51 seconds

Source

Audiovisual Collection, AV.RR.07.A

Coverage (Time Period)

1961-1970;

Rights

Permission to reproduce this item is required and may be subject to copyright, fees, and other legal restrictions. For more information, please contact: E. Kirkbride Miller Art Research Library, Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, (443) 573-1778, bmalibrary@artbma.org